BBC2 drama White Heat follows a group of characters from the 1960s to the present day. Photograph: BBC/ITV Studios/Laurence Cendrowicz

Sixteen years ago, BBC2 broadcast Our Friends in the North, a much lauded tale of four friends and social and political change that began in the 60s. Next week the channel will attempt a similar feat with White Heat.

Kicking off in 1965, the drama focuses on a group of flatmates as they move through the decades to the present day. With acclaimed screenwriter Paula Milne behind the scripts, it is perhaps little wonder the drama is being thought of as Our Friends in the South.

"As a woman, this piece is semi-autobiographical – so that is what you see on screen," said Milne. "The inevitable comparison is with Our Friends in the North, and that is a brilliant drama and showed the audience is interested in long television stories. But it didn't have anything to do with women."

Feminism and its development are an essential part of Milne's narrative. "What women went through in the 60s was seismic. So I wanted to show that, because you don't often see it."

White Heat – the title is taken from Dominic Sandbrook's history of the 60s – has Charlotte, played by Claire Foy, at its centre. A middle-class girl from a seemingly traditional background, she moves into a flat where people from a mix of classes, races, and attitudes have been brought together as a social experiment.

"When I was a student I went to look at flats and in one of them, someone was going to set up this utopia. 'We're going to create a new way of living' – so no sex with the same person on consecutive days," said Milne. "There were four of us in the room and I blushed and went absolutely scarlet! I was 18, from Bucks and had been to a convent."

The decision to follow the characters across the decades came after the writer realised it was impossible to separate out individual decades; each was an evolution of and a reaction to the one that preceded it.

The BBC was interested in a drama covering the end of the last century. "Initially I think they were looking at starting in the 80s. But I was in Grosvenor Square [for a student protest in 1968 against the Vietnam war]. I experienced these things, or heard others experience them," she said. "I wanted to look to various things that I remembered or were worth looking at again but hadn't been perhaps so covered. So I didn't do the miners' strike, for instance."

The result is the drama, whose cast includes Lindsay Duncan, Juliet Stevenson, Jeremy Northam, Tamsin Greig and Hugh Quarshie, could be said to focus too heavily on "issues" that are tackled and seemingly ticked off a little neatly – a situation underlined by the housemates' differences from each other.

Milne began her career on Crossroads in the 70s, subsequently creating BBC hospital soap Angels, and the Bafta-winning The Politician's Wife for Channel 4, before recent work such as Small Island and The Night Watch.

Over her career she has seen the number of female screenwriters grow – she had to use new writers for Angels because there were so few available. "That has now all changed. The depth of women screenwriters is great to see. There are lots of women novelists and theatre writers but there have not been scriptwriters."

Recent television hits Call the Midwife, Birdsong and Scott and Bailey have all been penned by women.

Combined with the rise of female TV executives – the controller of BBC2 is Janice Hadlow, while Channel 4's chief creative officer is Jay Hunt – Milne says this increase is having an affect on TV, with more and better roles for women on screen.

White Heat continues the BBC's push to invest further in BBC2 drama. Last year the channel showcased a clutch of ambitious, if not always universally acclaimed, new dramas including The Shadowline, The Hour, and The Crimson Petal and the White.

"We doubled the budget on BBC2. It had lost its historical identity for a certain type of drama. We did that and then had all these interesting people coming with their brilliant ideas," said Ben Stephenson, the BBC's controller of drama commissioning.

While BBC1 shows have to be for everyone, BBC2 programmes can come at stories from an angle, said Stephenson. "There are going to be pieces that some people like, and some that people don't. I like that – it means that people are talking and having different opinions about it."

BBC2 dramas in the pipeline include Parade's End by Tom Stoppard and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and The Fall, a new police thriller starring Gillian Anderson.

• White Heat begins on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2.

Four female screenwriters riding high

Heidi Thomas: The Cranford writer delivered the BBC an enormous Sunday night hit with Call the Midwife, her dramatisation of Jennifer Worth's bestselling memoirs. Thomas, who wrote Cranford for BBC1, is also behind the corporation's current remake of Upstairs Downstairs.

Abi Morgan: Recently, it has seemed as if Abi Morgan was writing everything on screen. She adapted Sebastian Faulks' novel Birdsong for BBC1, and wrote the BBC2 50s newsroom drama The Hour last year – the show is to get a second series. On the big screen, Morgan also penned The Iron Lady and Steve McQueen's Shame.

Sally Wainwright: Police double-act Scott & Bailey owe many of their finest lines to Sally Wainwright who has paired up with Diane Taylor, a former Detective Inspector, for the show. The ITV drama, conceived by actors Suranne Jones and Sally Lindsay, has proved a ratings hit for the broadcaster. Wainwright won writer of the year at the 2009 RTS awards for another ITV drama, Unforgiven.

Sharon Horgan: The co-writer of the hilarious – and cruelly axed – BBC3 comedy Pulling is to return with a new six-part show for the channel. Dead Boss, which Horgan has co-written with Holly Walsh and in which she also stars as a woman falsely imprisoned for murdering her boss, is due to air this spring.